Why is Word on Fire undermining papal Catholic social teaching?

[a bad article misrepresents Benedict XVI and attacks social justice]

Last week, WordonFire.org, the website of Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, ran an essay by Henry T. Edmonson III, emeritus professor at Georgia College and State University and author of books on literature, politics, and ethics. When it first appeared, the essay bore the startling title “Pope Leo XIV Would Do Well to Study ‘Deus Caritas Est.’”¹ The piece was quickly republished under the new title “The Valuable Lessons of ‘Deus Caritas Est’.” Despite this damage control, the implication that Pope Leo XIV might have some catch-up to do can still be detected in the opening paragraphs.

It is, bluntly, a bad article: sloppily written,² fundamentally misrepresenting the thought of Pope Benedict XVI regarding Catholic social teaching with cherry-picked quotations, and wrongly pitting Benedict against the Catholic social teaching tradition in which he wrote and which he upheld. My friend

Henry Matthew Alt

has written an instructive rejoinder to Edmonson’s breathtaking claim that “nobody really knows” what social justice is, with solid documentation of the nature of social justice from official Catholic sources. In the present piece, I want to look more closely at Edmonson’s article and ask: What is a piece like this, so openly skeptical of papal teaching in the CST tradition and so harmful to the legacy of Benedict XVI, doing on the Word on Fire website?

Edmonson opens with a topical hook: the choice of Pope Leo XIV’s papal name and its connection to Pope Leo XIII, the father of modern Catholic social teaching:

With the choice of his papal name, the new Pope Leo XIV puts himself firmly in the tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST) begun by Leo XIII’s seminal encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“New Things”), which has inspired a long train of encyclicals on CST. To underscore the point, Leo XIV has said since his selection, “In our own day, the Church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching.”

So far, so good. Then … well, then we get this:

But not all have been pleased with the quality of CST in the nine or ten encyclicals since Rerum Novarum. Complaints include the lack of philosophical rigor, confusion over the proper division of Church and State, a misuse of the concept of “justice,” and a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism.

This paragraph—I mean. Where to begin? Let’s count the problems.

1. “But not all have been pleased” is transparently lame, content-free weasel language. (Since when has anything in Catholic teaching “pleased” everyone? Is Catholic teaching meant to “please” everyone?) Clearly Edmonson is not “pleased” with what he judges to be the “quality of CST” in “nine or ten” encyclicals—in pointed contrast to Leo XIV, apparently. This is presumably where Leo has something to learn.

2. Which “nine or ten” encyclicals does Edmonson mean to implicate?³ I can’t make my own bare-bones list⁴ of the most important post–Rerum Novarum encyclicals centrally concerned with CST fewer than a dozen.⁵ (While the encyclical that Edmonson is writing about, Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, would not make my bare-bones list, I would include Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate; more on this below.) Beyond that, CST plays some role in at least another half-dozen encyclicals, and probably more.⁶

3. For that matter, what about CST-relevant Church documents that aren’t papal encyclicals?⁷ In particular, what about the two 1965 documents of the Second Vatican Council, the declaration Dignitatis Humanae and especially the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes? What about the 2004 Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church, in which—as Benedict himself writes in the very encyclical Edmonson praises so highly—Catholic social teaching “has now found a comprehensive presentation”?

4. The word “complaints” in the second sentence is hyperlinked to a series of four 2021 essays published at the libertarian website Law & Liberty under the title “Magisterial Discontents: A Symposium on Catholic Social Teaching.”⁸ As substantiation of Edmonson’s claims, he may have chosen an odd reference point: On my casual perusal, at least, three of his four “complaints” are not obviously proposed in these articles.⁹ In particular, I noticed no challenge regarding “a misuse of the concept of ‘justice’” in CST encyclicals.

The allegation of the “misuse the concept of ‘justice’” is particularly relevant, because Edmonson’s thesis is that Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, offers a corrective to the “quality” issues in prior papal CST specifically in the area of “justice”:

For that reason, there are many valuable takeaways from Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”). A work of both theology and political philosophy, it is relatively short, cogently written, philosophically sound, and profound in its simplicity. Yet, it is not usually included in the CST encyclicals. But it should be.

So, what’s so special about Deus Caritas Est? The encyclical is about charitable activity, helping those in need. Benedict, however, avoids the word “justice” as long as he can because justice has become faddish by secular and ecclesiastical writers alike. It is a crucial Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue, but it is overused and now means different things to different people.

Bear in mind: When Edmonson talks about the word “justice” becoming “overused” and meaning “different things to different people,” he isn’t talking merely about the concept of justice in papal documents being misused by others. It is CST itself, in actual Catholic teaching—in at least “nine or ten encyclicals” since Rerum—that Edmonson implicates in “misuse of the concept of justice.” What’s more, he here posits that Benedict XVI agrees with him regarding this “misuse,” and therefore “avoids the word ‘justice’ as long as he can.”

Then, in a series of rhetorical questions, comes the crux of Edmonson’s critique of the “misuse of justice” in CST encyclicals:

What is social justice? Nobody really knows, but it sounds full of cachet. What is international justice? Few agree on its meaning, but it sounds sophisticated. What is racial justice? It’s hard to say because, as some believe, we are all racists. What is economic justice? It depends—are you a Marxist, a socialist, a capitalist, a libertarian, a radical leftist, a MAGA, an anarchist, or a Unitarian?

N.b. This is the one and only mention in this article of any of these justice-related compound terms. Edmonson doesn’t call out the alleged ambiguity or polyvalence of “social justice” or “economic justice” in order to proceed to clarify what these terms really mean in an authentic construction of Catholic social teaching. The article is at least functionally agnostic on the meaning of these terms, and at least skeptical that they carry any valuable meaning at all.¹⁰

Does Edmonson really believe that, whatever the “faddish” appeal and apparent “cachet”¹¹ of social justice, “nobody really knows” what it is? Including the popes from Pius XI on who have written about it? If so, it would seem that he considers the term “social justice” itself an example of the “misuse of the concept of justice” indicted in his first paragraph. At least, if this is not the case—if Edmonson admits, in principle, the validity and usefulness of the term “social justice” in some high-quality construction of Catholic social teaching, or if he allows that any pope using the term ever meant anything significant by it—he gives not the slightest indication of this.

The Church and policy recommendations

Instead, Edmonson labors to represent Benedict as defining the role of the Church in the public sphere as

1. teaching basic moral principles, including natural law,

2. working to “purify reason,” and

3. resisting the temptation to make public policy recommendations, which carries the allure of being celebrated by the left and the mainstream media.

To that last point, relying in part on a line from Benedict in another source, Edmonson writes, “It is not difficult to read between the lines to see that Benedict is warning the clergy not to be seduced by the glamour of seeing their names on the front page of The New York Times, not only because it is not their role but also because they are unwittingly serving partisan interests.” He also adds, “Aside from the Church’s heroic stance on abortion, many Catholic policy recommendations in recent decades have favored the interests of the Democratic party.”

Given his celebration of the Church’s “heroic stance on abortion,” Edmonson presumably can’t quite believe that the Church must never make policy recommendations, full stop. That one line aside, though, he really conveys the impression that he does:

• Edmonson represents Benedict as saying that it is “not the Church’s role to make specific recommendations on public policy, especially on those areas in which sensible people might disagree.” This construction does not strictly allow that, in those areas where “sensible people” (whoever they are) may not disagree, the Church may make specific public policy recommendations—though I think Edmonson would grudgingly admit this if pressed.

• Benedict suggests, according to Edmonson, that the Church “too often oversteps its competence in making policy recommendations that are beyond both its responsibility and also its capability, whether immigration policy, climate policy, or economic policy, for example.” Here he doesn’t quite say that such policy recommendations are never within the Church’s competence, but, again, the idea of public policy recommendations that are not “overstepping” finds no support his language.

Benedict’s continuity with the CST tradition

Astonishingly, Edmonson is silent about Benedict’s explicit endorsement, in the very passage of Deus Caritas Est from which he here quotes, of the Catholic social teaching tradition represented by the very encyclicals that Edmonson deprecates, along with other CST documents! In fact, Benedict laments that “the Church’s leadership was slow to realize the issue of the just structuring of society” in a changing world “needed to be approached in a new way.” Benedict continues (emphasis added):

In 1891, the papal magisterium intervened with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII. This was followed in 1931 by Pius XI’s Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In 1961 Blessed John XXIII published the Encyclical Mater et Magistra, while Paul VI, in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967) and in the Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens (1971), insistently addressed the social problem, which had meanwhile become especially acute in Latin America. My great predecessor John Paul II left us a trilogy of social Encyclicals: Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and finally Centesimus Annus (1991). Faced with new situations and issues, Catholic social teaching thus gradually developed, and has now found a comprehensive presentation in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council Iustitia et Pax.… In today’s complex situation, not least because of the growth of a globalized economy, the Church’s social doctrine has become a set of fundamental guidelines offering approaches that are valid even beyond the confines of the Church: in the face of ongoing development these guidelines need to be addressed in the context of dialogue with all those seriously concerned for humanity and for the world in which we live.

It could hardly be clearer that Benedict XVI sees himself as writing in continuity with his predecessors in a tradition that he sees as coming into its own in his time. The corrective or contrasting element that Edmonson wants to find in Benedict’s writing is his own invention, imposed on Benedict through selective quotation and glossing.¹² Edmonson is of course free to deprecate the “quality” of all of this along with the other CST encyclicals, but he wants to make out that Benedict is fundamentally in agreement with him, which is manifestly not the case.

The selectivity of the cherry-picked quotations is glaring: Edmonson quotes Benedict’s assertion that the political task “cannot be the Church’s immediate responsibility,” but fails to quote the next sentence (emphasis added):

Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.

N.b. The Church has a specific contribution to make, not only towards “understanding the requirement of justice,” but also of “achieving them politically.”

Edmonson cannot even accurately represent Benedict’s thought regarding the failings of Marxism. He quotes approvingly the following passage:

Since the nineteenth century, an objection has been raised to the Church’s charitable activity, subsequently developed with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice. Works of charity—almsgiving—are in effect a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and a means of soothing their consciences, while preserving their own status and robbing the poor of their rights.

Glossing this, Edmonson heaps contempt on what he calls the “absurd Marxist complaint,” calling the Marxist prescription “no response at all,” a “call to violence and destruction,” and “a grotesque twentieth-century experiment.” A trusting reader would never suspect that Benedict’s assessment was more nuanced: The pope says there is “much that is mistaken” here, but also “admittedly some truth to this argument.” Benedict even says that the concentration of “capital and the means of production” in “the hands of a few” led to “the suppression of the rights of the working classes, against which they had to rebel.” I’m tempted to call this an apparent example of the “failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism” that Edmonson diagnoses in other CST encyclicals; it might not be quite accurate, but it would be more accurate than Edmonson’s characterization of Benedict!

Caritas in Veritate

Of course Edmonson doesn’t mention Benedict’s third and final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (2009), his most substantial contribution to CST. Like Deus Caritas Est, but at far greater length, Caritas in Veritate rereads the history of the development of Catholic social teaching in the encyclicals of his predecessors—above all Paul VI’s 1967 Populorum Progressio, which Benedict praises as “the Rerum Novarum of the present age.”

Deus Caritas Est alluded to the concept of social justice without using the term; Caritas in Veritate—which uses the term “justice” early and often, with none of the aversion to the word that Edmonson diagnosed in Deus Caritas Est—explicitly speaks not only of “social justice,” but also “commutative justice,” “distributive justice,” and “inter-generational justice” (compound terms Edmonson somehow missed in his set of sardonic rhetorical questions).

This encyclical also makes many specific judgments about the demands of justice in the modern world of the sort that Edmonson appears to feel are outside the Church’s competence. For example, Benedict is clear that social problems cannot be left to the invisible hand of the market, and that economic justice requires redistribution of wealth governed by political action, and not only private philanthropy.

Why is this essay on the Word on Fire website?

Thanks to

Eric Anderson

(

Reformation Catholicism

) for bringing it to my attention, a couple of days after this piece was published, that in 2020 Word on Fire published a Catholic Social Teaching Collection edited by Daniel Seseske and Matthew Becklo, with a foreword by Bishop Barron.¹³ This collection includes excerpts from many important CST encyclicals, including the full text of both Rerum Novarum and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus. There are also chapters on the Old and New Testaments, the Didache, the Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas, and various modern figures from Bartolomé de las Casas to St. Óscar Romero.

Meanwhile, as I noted when I first published this essay, I noted that the Word on Fire website has a Social Justice tag with about 75 entries, which at least suggests acceptance of social justice as a coherent concept. Perusing the titles (“Are Reverent Liturgies and Social Justice at Odds?”; “Rehabilitating Social Justice”) does reveal a certain caution regarding social justice and a concern regarding misuse of the term, but not a complete rejection. In his own remarks on Leo XIV’s choice of papal name, Bishop Barron acknowledged Leo’s identification with modern Catholic social teaching and social justice as something appealing to “more liberal Catholics” without, again, rejecting it altogether.

What are we to make of the publication of Edmonson’s piece on the Word on Fire website? I see three possibilities:

1. It could be that Word on Fire accepts and defends Catholic social teaching and social justice in principle, and that this piece was a miss, as happens everywhere now and then. I would like to think that this is the case. It would be easier to think that if this bad and damaging piece, already retitled, were pulled altogether.

2. It could be that Word on Fire embraces, if not a big tent, at least a medium-sized tent range of rightward-leaning approaches to social justice, from cautious acknowledgement to pretty much outright dismissal, as in this piece.

3. It could be that Word on Fire is evolving from a more orthodox embrace of Catholic Social Teaching in its fullness toward the more MAGA-fied anti–social justice conservatism of this piece. I sincerely hope that this is not the case.

P.S. For a good discussion of what social justice is, here’s that piece I mentioned above.

Article at Barron's Word on Fire claims "nobody really knows" what social justice is.

Also related:

1. Yes. Really.

2. You would never know, for example, from Edmonson’s brief discussion of agape and eros in Deus Caritas Est, and his account of the pope’s concern to “distinguish” agape and eros, that Benedict’s deeper topic is “the unity of love,” and how divine love is both eros and agape, and human eros also can become agape.

As a more trivial example of sloppiness, Edmonson calls Laudato Si’ Pope Francis’s ”encyclical on climate change.” In fact, climate change is just one component of the much larger topic of that encyclical: namely, “care for our common home,” the Earth, in economic and social perspective. (Edmonson latching onto climate change is understandable if, as is perhaps suggested by his remark about the encyclical leaving people like him “scratching their heads,” he is a climate change skeptic.)

3. Another example of the article’s sloppiness: “The quality of CST in the nine or ten encyclicals since Rerum Novarum” needed another editorial pass, as there have been a lot more than “nine or ten encyclicals since Rerum Novarum.” (Leo XIII alone wrote 50 encyclicals after Rerum.) What Edmonson means, of course, is encyclicals since Rerum Novarum that are focused on CST, or, more succinctly, “CST encyclicals” since Rerum Novarum.

4. This is where I insert my standard disclaimer: I am a student of Catholic social teaching, not a scholar, and I welcome commentary, corrections, and additions from those who know more than I do.

5. My bare-bones list of post–Rerum Novarum “CST encyclicals,” minus the two key ones by Benedict XVI; see note 6 below for more.

• Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI, 1931), marking the 40th anniversary of Rerum Novarum

• Mater et Magistra (John XXIII, 1961), on Christianity and social progress

• Pacem in Terris (John XXIII, 1963), on social order and human rights

• Populorum Progressio (Paul VI, 1967), on social and economic development

• Laborem Exercens (John Paul II, 1981), on labor, marking the 90th anniversary of Rerum Novarum

• Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (John Paul II, 1987), on social development, marking the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio

• Centesimus Annus (John Paul II, 1991), marking the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum

• Caritas in Veritate (Benedict XVI, 2009), on integral human development

• Evangelii Gaudium (Francis, 2013), on proclaiming the gospel and its social implications

• Laudato Si’ (Francis, 2015), on care for the Earth in relation to social and economic issues

• Fratelli Tutti (Francis, 2020), on a wide range of social and economic concerns

• Laudate Deum (2023, Francis), on the climate-change crisis

6. If we focus first of all on encyclicals addressing global realities and addressed to global audiences, we can bracket

• Divini Redemptoris (Pius XI, 1937), against bolshevism and atheistic communism

• Singulari Quadam (Pius X, 1912), on labor unions, addressed specifically to the bishops of Germany

• Querida Amazonia (Pope Francis, 2020), with its focus on the Amazon region

These are nevertheless encyclicals with important implications for CST. There are also encyclicals with notable CST dimensions that aren’t necessarily principally about CST. Among others worth noting:

• Evangelium Vitae (John Paul II, 1995), a mainly theological work that also discusses issues related to a just social order and the obligations of the state

• Deus Caritas Est (Benedict XVI, 2005), another mainly theological work with CST implications (some developed by Edmonson)

• Sacramentum Caritatis (Benedict XVI, 2007), with CST questions in nos. 88–92 in particular

• Dilexit Nos (Francis, 2024), on love and the Incarnation, with some social dimensions

7. In addition to the two Vatican II documents, other non-encyclicals nor Vatican II documents include

• Pope Pius XII’s 1952 apostolic constitution Exsul Familia, sometimes called “the Church’s Magna Carta for migrants”

• Paul VI’s 1971 apostolic letter Octogesima Adveniens

• the 1971 Synod of Bishops document Justicia in Mundo

• the 2002 Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

• the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace

8. Some of these Law & Liberty essays, in turn, link to critiques of CST from notable Catholic thinkers such as natural law theologians John Finnis and Russell Hittinger. I feel obliged to point out that the shared title of this collection of essays, “Magisterial Discontents,” describes some, but not all, of the four authors; specifically, there are no “complaints” against papal CST in my friend

Leah Libresco Sargeant

’s contribution, nor would I describe her as a “magisterial discontent.” See also note 9 below.

9. The charge of “lack of philosophical rigor” is echoed in the essay by Nathaniel Peters, at least as regards post–Vatican II CST encyclicals. I noticed no concern among the linked essays regarding “confusion over the proper division of Church and State, a misuse of the concept of ‘justice,’ and a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism.” For a critical evaluation of the Law & Liberty essays, see Edwin Woodruff Tait’s commentary on Patheos.

10. For example, “because, as some believe, we are all racists” functions here as the kind of reductio that pretty clearly indicates a person who is fundamentally skeptical of “racial justice” as a concept.

11. I’m not too proud to admit that I’m much more sure that I know the meaning of “social justice” than of the phrase “full of cachet.”

12. A reader determined to try to pit Deus Caritas Est against the CST tradition might argue that Benedict’s praise for prior encyclicals is merely the rhetorical respect that popes conventionally give to their predecessors “of happy memory.” Yet this flies in the face of Benedict’s lament for the “slowness” of the Church’s leaders to recognize that “the issue of the just structuring of society needed to be approached in a new way,” and his praise for CST “pioneers” like Bishop Wilhelm Ketteler of Mainz, whose work influenced Rerum Novarum. (Bishop Ketteler’s specific policy proposals included government protections for workers, including increased wages, reduced hours, and prohibitions against child labor in factories.)

13. This section has been edited since original publication in light of Word on Fire’s 2020 Catholic Social Teaching Collection.